AngryHacker's questions

I would like to automatically stop/start or recycle the app pool when it reaches 80% of CPU usage for a certain period of time.

I see that under app pool Advanced Settings, there is a CPU section and it has Limit (percent), Limit Action and Limit Interval (minutes) properties.

What happens when I set the following?

`Limit Action` to `KillW3wp`
`Limit (percent)` to 80%
`Limit Interval (minutes)` to 1.  

According to the documentation, the application pool is shut down for the duration of the reset interval. Does this mean that if the app pool has a momentary spike to 80% it is immediately killed and restarted in 1 minute?

What I would like to have happened is if the CPU is > 80% for a minute or longer, the app pool is killed and a new one is created immediately (basically overlapped recycle). Is that possible?

P.S. I did some research and testing and here is what I found - in case someone else needs these features.

If your process is over Limit (percent) for period of Limit Interval (minutes), IIS will send a shutdown signal. If your process doesn't respond to it and shutdown peacefully, IIS will wait for period indicated in Application Pool Advanced Settings: Process Model / Shutdown Time Limit (seconds) and then forcefully shut it down. There will typically be entries in the Event Viewer describing what it's doing.

Note that in my experience, the timings were extremely approximate. Sometimes IIS would carry out its actions down to the second. But mostly they were off by up to a minute.

I understand all the benefits of HTTP/2, however, are there proven apples to apples comparisons to show it's speed advantage?

Akamai has a page put up for this purpose, but it seems HTTP/2 at best keeps pace and at worst is slower. I tested it in Firefox. In Chrome, HTTP/2 was slightly faster.

I have an internal app that needs to send emails on other people's behalf. For instance, I might need to send an email from [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected] to [email protected].

All our email is in Office365. Basically, this is relaying email and it does sound close to what spammers do.

Is this possible to with Office365? What permissions would the account need to have?

Our IT created a VM with 2 CPUs allocated rather than the 4 I requested. Their reason is that the VM performs better with 2 CPUs rather than 4 (according to them). The rationale is that the VM hypervisor (VMWare in this case) waits for all the CPUs to be available before engaging any of them. Thus, it takes longer to wait for 4 rather than 2 CPUs.

Does this statement make sense?

Docker Containers (which is basically application isolation, afaik) look handy but they are only for Linux. Even "Docker Container for Windows" basically just installs a Linux VM into VirtualBox on Windows.

So is there such a thing as a Docker Container like technology for Windows Server?

I've installed a Hyper-V role onto my Windows 2008 R2 Server. I have a bunch of VMs cranking at full speed, but the Task Manager on the host doesn't show any CPU activity from the VMs.

This kind of makes it difficult to quickly gauge the overall business of the host box and is annoying.

Is there an option somewhere either in the UI or registry or wherever else for the Task Manager to include the CPU Usage from the VMs?

I want to build a minimal VM (in Hyper-V on Windows 2008 R2) that runs HAProxy to load balance a bunch of web services.

Is there a preferred Linux distribution that provides a small, yet functional environment from which to build the HAProxy balancer. And obviously, the Linux distribution would have to work in Hyper-V.

I want to load balance a bunch of VMs, but don't have any Linux boxes available. Typically, afaik, it's done with HAProxy on Linux.

Is there an HAProxy equivalent on Windows? (free, open-source if possible).

I got my VHD in Hyper-V and it's running great. Since I got a great big server, I'd like to fire up a number of copies of this VHD. How do I do that? I didn't see anything obvious in the UI.

When the server restarts, I need to kick off a process in a form of a batch file (that basically preloads a bunch of data that will be needed later).

I haven't found an effective way to do this (other than write a Windows service). Am I missing something simple?

My server rebooted and I am not sure why. Is there a way to find out, e.g. perhaps someone did it manually, or as a result of a windows update or a blue screen?

I've looked in the Event Viewer, but I am not sure what to look for - there are million items there.

I have a WCF service app hosted in IIS. On startup, it goes and fetches a really expensive (in terms of time and cpu) resource to use as local cache.

Unfortunately, IIS seems to recycle the process on a fairly regular basis. So I am trying to change the settings on the Application Pool to make sure that IIS does not recycle the application. So far, I've change the following:

• Limit Interval under CPU from 5 to 0.
• Idle Time-out under Process Model from 20 to 0.
• Regular Time Interval under Recycling from 1740 to 0.

Will this be enough? And I have specific questions about the items I changed:

1. What specifically does Limit Interval setting under CPU mean? Does it mean that if a certain CPU usage is exceeded, the application pool will be recycled?
2. What exactly does "recycled" mean? Is the application completely torn down and started up again?
3. What is the difference between "Worker Process shutdown" and "Application Pool recycling"? The documentation for the Idle Time-out under Process Model talks about shutting down the worker process. While the docs for Regular Time Interval under Recycling talk about application pool recycling. I don't quite grok the difference between the two. I thought the w3wp.exe is the worker process which runs the application pool. Can someone explain the difference to the application between the two?

The reason for having IIS7 and IIS7.5 tags is because the app will run in both and hope the answers are the same between the versions.

Image for reference:

I have a ton of IIS monthly logs. Can someone recommend software that can help me analyze them (e.g. visitors, os/browser statistics, all the standard stuff)?

I'd like a piece of software that does not require me to setup a server or anything complicated. Simply point it to a file or folder and it'll do the rest. Back in the day (90s) there was something like that, but I can't find it now.

Thanks

Does Virtual Server 2005 R2 have a command line interface, that's versatile enough?

Here is a situation. I run a Win2k VM on an old memory constrained machine. I allocate it 378MB of RAM and the VM runs just fine. Once a month, inside the VM, I backup the (a very large) database, compress it using 7Zip and ftp it to the backup site (all in a script).

Unfortunately the compression part takes a massive amount of RAM (far exceeding the 378MB), it goes for the paging file and brings absolutely everything to a crawl and literally takes 2-3 days, if left unattended. So to fix this, I have to shutdown the VM, give it temporarily 768MB of RAM and then the whole thing finishes in 20 minutes.

So, is there a way do the following automatically from the host machine in a script?

1. Shutdown the guest OS (I think, I got this part)
2. Change the RAM allocation from 378 to 768
3. Start the guest OS again

then, 1 hour later, do everything in reverse.

Edit: thx to Wesley 'Nonapeptide' for the links. I cobbled up a script and it works like butter. It takes the memory amount as a parameter. Here it is for any folks who might want to do this:

if Wscript.Arguments.Count = 0 then 
  Wscript.Quit
end if

memory = Wscript.Arguments(0)

Set objVS = CreateObject("VirtualServer.Application")
Set objVM = objVS.FindVirtualMachine("vbRad.com")

Set objGuestOS = objVM.GuestOS 
Set objTask = objGuestOS.Shutdown() 
objTask.WaitForCompletion(600000)

objVM.Memory = memory 

Set objTask = objVM.Startup()
objTask.WaitForCompletion(600000)

Let's say WireShark is installed on computer A. And let's say I am looking at a Youtube video on the computer B.

Can WireShark see what computer B is doing?

I am an admin on the box and would like to stop/start a certain app pool without having to log into the box.

Is there a command line to do this task?

Previously I asked a question on what metrics I should measure (e.g. before and after) to justify a memory upgrade. Perfmon was suggested.

I'd like to know which specific perfmon counters I should be measuring. So far I got:

PhysicalDisk/Avg. Disk Queue Length (for each drive)
PhysicalDisk/Avg. Disk Write Queue Length (for each drive)
PhysicalDisk/Avg. Disk Read Queue Length (for each drive)
Processor/Processor Time%
SQLServer:BufferManager/Buffer cache hit ratio

What other ones should I use?

My employer has over a thousand servers (running SQL Server 2005 x64 and a couple of other apps) all across the country. And in my opinion they are all massively underpowered for what they need to do.

Specifically, I feel that the servers simply do not have enough RAM for the amount of volume the machines are asked to do. All the servers currently have 6GB of RAM. The users are pretty much always complaining about performance (mostly because, immo, the server dips into the paging file quite often).

I finally convinced the powers that be to at least try out a memory upgrade on one box and see the results. However, they want before and after metrics, so that they can see that the expense will be justified.

My question is what metrics should I collect to see whether the performance truly improves on the box? I am a dev, so I am not sure how and what to collect (i have a passing knowledge of Perfmon).

EDIT: I guess I am looking for specific counters to test for.

I have a quite a few servers deployed around the world. They are running Windows 2003 x64 with SQL Server 2005 x64 with 6 GB of RAM. The boxes do not have the best (or even an acceptable) configuration, because the guy that ordered them years ago didn't really know what he was doing.

The boxes are fairly consistently running out of memory, end up using the paging file and everything slows down. Typically the commit charge is 5.8GB and then when someone needs to do something intensive (e.g. run a report), that number goes through the roof.

I've been trying to get the powers that be order more memory, but I am getting massive opposition (e.g. make the software more performant, costs too much for all these servers, or prove that the box does not have enough memory, etc...).

Are there guidelines (or a formula) for how much RAM a box needs that I can present to non-techies, so that we can finally order more memory?

I am trying to install SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3 and it keeps failing. Comes back with the following:

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 - Update 'Service Pack 3 for SQL Server Database Services 2005 ENU (KB955706)' could not be installed. Error code 1603.

The detailed dump reveals the following:

MSI (s) (90:C8) [13:50:17:776]: Note: 1: 1729 MSI (s) (90:C8) [13:50:17:776]: Transforming table Error.   
MSI (s) (90:C8) [13:50:17:776]: Note: 1: 2262 2: Error 3: -2147287038 MSI (s) (90:C8) [13:50:17:792]: Transforming table Error.   
MSI (s) (90:C8) [13:50:17:792]: Transforming table Error.    
MSI (s) (90:C8) [13:50:17:792]: Note: 1: 2262 2: Error 3: -2147287038 MSI (s) (90:C8) [13:50:17:792]: Transforming table Error.    
MSI (s) (90:C8) [13:50:17:792]: Note: 1: 2262 2: Error 3: -2147287038 MSI (s) (90:C8) [13:50:17:792]: Transforming table Error.    
MSI (s) (90:C8) [13:50:17:792]: Note: 1: 2262 2: Error 3: -2147287038 MSI (s) (90:C8) [13:50:17:792]: Transforming table Error.
MSI (s) (90:C8) [13:50:17:792]: Note: 1: 2262 2: Error 3: -2147287038 MSI (s) (90:C8) [13:50:17:807]: Transforming table Error.    
MSI (s) (90:C8) [13:50:17:807]: Transforming table Error.    
MSI (s) (90:C8) [13:50:17:807]: Note: 1: 2262 2: Error 3: -2147287038 MSI (s) (90:C8) [13:50:17:807]: Transforming table Error.  
MSI (s) (90:C8) [13:50:17:807]: Note: 1: 2262 2: Error 3: -2147287038 MSI (s) (90:C8) [13:50:17:807]: Transforming table Error.  
MSI (s) (90:C8) [13:50:17:807]: Note: 1: 2262 2: Error 3: -2147287038 MSI (s) (90:C8) [13:50:17:807]: Product: Microsoft SQL Server 2005 -- Configuration failed.

Does it mean anything to anybody?

Btw, this Q originally came from SO (936895)